On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 09:57 +0000, Bob Williams wrote:
Hi,
I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop, which is running Windows Vista Home Premium. The machine has a single drive, 250Gb. I would like to install openSUSE 11.2 alongside the Windows OS, so that I can dual boot, but I would like to hear of other people who have already done this without any mishaps. Or maybe I want to hear from those who did have mishaps, and how they overcame them.
I have done the process of installing linux after Windows before, and YaST looked after me all the way, but about six months ago I tried to impress a friend, and ended up with an unbootable machine - the BIOS reported 'no operating system found'. I know that both operating systems were installed in their respective partitions, and the problem was something to do with grub writing into the MBR, which upset Windows Vista :(
I have googled to a few forums, where I have found howtos, and I have read the HowTo on the openSUSE site which describes installing openSUSE alongside Windows, but onto separate hard drives.
Any pointers would be welcome. Meanwhile, I'm defragmenting Windows, in preparation for resizing its partition. Y'see, I'm committed ;)
TIA,
Bob -- Registered Linux User #463880 FSFE Member #1300 GPG-FP: A6C1 457C 6DBA B13E 5524 F703 D12A FB79 926B 994E openSUSE 11.2, Kernel 2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop, KDE 4.3.3 Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz, 4GB DDR RAM, nVidia GeForce 9200GS
Hi, I have installed opensuse on windows computers as a dual boot many times. I found the following steps to be very helpful in achieving a trouble-free installation. 1. If the wind* Operating System has been used for some time previous, then I defragment windo* until it doesn't need to be defragmented again. You can tell when this happens because it only takes 30 seconds to a minute to do the defragmentation. Usually, it takes about five times of defragmenting to do this if the Win* system was used, and only once if it is a fresh win installation. 2. In the win control panel>administrative tools section there is a partioning tool. Use this to shrink the windows partion to leave a unused space on the harddrive into which you will install opensuse. 3. I then set the computer bios to boot from the cd drive as the first boot priority. 4. I usually use gparted to set up my partitions for opensuse before I do the opensuse installation because I usually set up my computer to boot wind* and two other linux systems, but the opensuse installer is fully capable of doing the installation without any other tools. If you want to use gparted, it can be downloaded from here http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php The simple partioning that I use is to make the entire unused space on the harddrive into one extended partition. Then I make three logical partions in the extended partition. The first logical partion is my swap partion. I make this two times the size of the total ram memory on my computer. The next partition that I make is my root (/) partition. This partition I usually make a minimum of 10 gigabytes. The next partition that I make is my home (/home) partition. I also make this a minimum of 10 gigabytes, but what I do is to make the remainder of the unused space into the home partition. If you don't use gparted, you can let suse automatically install into the total unused space (easiest). Or, you can use the partitioning tools in the opensuse installer in expert mode to set the partition sizes as I have described above (a little harder than the automatic installation, but not too much harder). 5. Then I put the opensuse disc in the cd/dvd drive and install opensuse. I install the grub bootloader so the computer boots from the mbr. The system will install, then reboot the computer automatically. Once it has rebooted and you are finished playing with the computer for the evening, then take the Opensuse installation disk out of the cd drive and shut the computer down. Before you leave everything to go to bed, restart the computer once more, and enter the bios to reset the boot order so that the hard drive is reset to sequence before the cd drive. I hope that this helps you. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org